Gallivandalid Journal #1: Story
            I seek to describe something that cannot be put into words; to communicate a feeling which, at once well-defined and completely mysterious, defies explanation.  And so I turn to the long form; I turn to a form which in itself can be well-defined and yet mysterious, explicit yet ambiguous.  I turn to the long form, for it shares so many characteristics of the feeling which I seek to explain. 
           At any given moment, you may put your finger on the feeling, identify it with a word, with an explanation, and yet if you place your finger twice, at different moments, the same feeling deserves a different explanation.  You explain it once, and then later – without changing its form as a whole – in an instant it feels completely different.  So it is with the long form story: at any one moment, the scene is what it is.  At any given moment, something is happening, something explicit and describable, yet as a whole, the book, the story, are so much more than just the compilation of those scenes.  By the interaction of the feelings of each scene, the whole takes on a life of its own, a life that cannot be contained by any one scene within its pages.
           I seek to explain this feeling of the irreconcilable bifurcation of the soul that is at the same time complete wholeness and unity.  I seek to explain this perpetual sadness that is, in its whole, joy; I seek to find how loneliness and desolation become fulfilment.  I seek to explain how that which is bitter and that which is sweet mix to become bittersweet.  I seek to find the point at which melancholy cascades over into a deep and abiding joy.
           I turn to the long form to explain these things for on their face, in the short run, they feel as contradictions: one fails to see how sorrow is joy, how frustration is triumph, how loss becomes gain.  Only through the long, arduous journey do these things become one and the same, only as they change imperceptibly from scene to scene may they combine.  I say combine, for they do not transform – sorrow remains sorrow, yet it is also joy.  Bitterness is still bitter, yet it is sweet.  Brokenness and confusion remain, yet they are part of the unified whole.  They spring from the same well, from the same experiences and memories, from the same heart, and they remain truly distinct, while becoming the same.
           As I have said, the short form cannot explain this; it may only point out the contradictions, not the unity.  The short form, as I write now, cannot contain the mystery – it may point out the mystery, but it cannot explain it.  And so I turn to the long form to explain these things, to craft this feeling bit by bit until it is whole.  For the story itself will be bitter, yet sweet; sorrowful, yet joyful; broken, yet whole; at odds with itself, yet unified; ambiguous, yet explicit; in turmoil, yet at peace.  For the feeling which I seek to explain is all of these things all at once, and so the story will be.  And so the story must be, for I do not know how else to explain these things which defy explanation.
           -- Gallivandalid

Gallivandalid Journal #2: History
            Why, then, do I turn to history for my works?  Why not allow myself the freedom of writing whatever I wish to create these disparate contradictions that I seek to reconcile?  The answer is simple: I feel that all of the things which I seek to explain are natural, easily found in the world in which we live.  People speak much of the commission which I received from the transitional government to write this work – but they forget that I was studying the Harbingers even before the Civil War.  In fact, I studied the Harbingers before even the Harbinger Resurgence just before the Civil War.
​           They fascinate me, you see, these warriors do.  The strife and conflict which they raised – not least among themselves – left in its wake highly fertile ground for the emotions which I seek to portray.  So I sought them; I followed their path through the world until, the first time, I was detained by the rising Civil War, or until, the second time, I ran into what appears to be the last record of the Harbinger of War.  Even before the Civil War, their trail had been saturated with the very ideas and emotions that I sought.  Now, so many years later, the whole world knows the feeling, yet the Harbingers’ path remains unique in the severity of that feeling. 
           Truth be told, I don’t believe that I am skilled enough to craft a fictional narrative capable of communicating my purpose.  It is far too natural of a feeling, rooted in real experience, real suffering, real recovery and growth.  It would be a tragedy for me to create a fictional world in which to describe these things when the real world exemplifies them all too well already.  Therefore, I turn to history for the content of my works; I turn to events that all of us already know of, and seek to explain them better.  I turn to the tragedies which have affected us all, the struggles which we have weathered together, the losses from which we have grown again, in order to tell the story not just of what happened in the world, but what happened to the people in it.
            I turn to history to draw out from it this feeling which I seek to communicate because history already knows the feeling.  It takes only a clever hand to draw it out into the light from where it hides among the shadows of the past.
            -- Gallivandalid

Gallivandalid Journal #3: The Harbingers
            My specific fascination with the Harbingers has been questioned by some.  They claim that I project my thoughts, my quest to find and explain the inexplicable onto the relatively blank canvass of the world’s most mysterious force of chaos.  I retort back that I have the testimony of a close friend of a Harbinger that she indeed felt these very things, and that they made themselves evident during their journey together – I retort that I am not filling in a blank canvass, but rather restoring the damaged sections of a painting that was once whole.  In some cases, yes, I must fill in gaps with my own vision of what once must have been there according to what I know of the whole work and from what I see immediately surrounding the gap.  In some cases, I may be mistaken as to what belongs in said gap.  But this is a natural consequence of working with such difficult source material.
            As to why I chose the Harbingers – a topic which I touched on in my previous letter.  I would not have chosen such difficult source material had I not felt that they already matched the theme which I wished to present.  At the very least, had I felt that they did not already tend toward matching the feeling which I seek to elucidate, I would have written a textbook, or simply presented the documents and testimonies which I have come across in my travels and interviews.  I could have chosen any structure but a narrative if I had reason to believe that constructing such a narrative – with all of my ideas as to what that narrative should present included – would have detracted from the truthfulness of my report.  As it is, though, I believe that the Harbingers truly did feel that feeling which I seek to present; I believe that the Harbingers truly did leave in their wake the perfect conditions in which this feeling thrives.  And so I see no issue in presenting the Harbingers in this light, and for that matter, neither did Adam Taylor, companion of the Harbinger of War, see any issue in presenting the woman in this light.  Therefore, I will continue as I have.
            It is also worth mentioning that I could have chosen many, many other stories from the recent Civil War to present my theme.  There are far too many stories of broken families coming to terms with their loss, or orphaned boys and girls growing up in a decade of war coming into their own, or of hardened solders coming to understand the true value of life.  There are stories of politicians who, staring at what their own hands wrought, learned the meaning of merciful rule.  There are stories of hardline Rebels or Resistance men learning that they shared more with their enemies than they ever might have supposed.  I could have chosen any of these stories in which to present my theme, and had characters just as deep, just as effective and affecting, with plots perhaps even more interesting – and with substantially less forest-wandering.  But I chose the Harbingers for their unique position in causing suffering on such a vast scale, and the unique position of the Harbinger of War in coming to terms with her participation in suffering.  I chose the Harbingers not because no one else shared the emotions which I believe they felt, but rather because no one else had as unique and pivotal of a story as the Harbingers did.  One Rebel solider fighting to understand his conscience might cause a change in a shift schedule in some city; one Harbinger choosing a side might change the whole war.
            -- Gallivandalid

Gallivandalid Journal #4: Journey
            Looking back, I never really had a clue as to where I should go next.  Each village I visited, each story I heard, latched me onto some other little clue which I could follow to another village, another story.  I wandered the world, following stories of the war and of the Harbingers, of people who claimed to have seen them or to have known someone from a village destroyed by them.  Despite never knowing where I would go next or how long I would be travelling, I somehow arrived at each place in sequence, eventually finding and holding onto the Harbingers’ trail of destruction.  After nearly a year of running in circles and chasing legends, I received a letter from Adam Taylor, saying that he had heard of my effort to recreate the story.  He offered to give me the whole tale, beginning to end, and the answers to any questions I still had.
            Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity.  To those who have criticized that I chose to use only a single source, I respond with this: there is no other source that knows the tale.  At least, no source that I can reasonably find.  In all the time that I wandered about, journeying through the countryside from village to village chasing tall tales and fabrications, I met no one who ever even spoke to a Harbinger.  Sure, I met plenty of people who had lost relatives to Harbinger raids, or whose husbands or sons had fought in the final days of the civil war and had seen the Harbinger of War in the battlefield, but none that I met could tell me anything about the women themselves.  So I must reconstruct the story from Adam Taylor’s interviews.  While there’s plenty of sources out there, none but Adam truly know the story.
            Further, for those who criticize my inclusion of the prologue, claiming that I have no source that witnessed the events and therefore I might as well have fabricated the whole sequence: the only survivor of those events was the Harbinger of War.  Unless someone somehow manages to track her down, we’ll never hear a first-hand account of any of it.  So perhaps Mr. Taylor can only tell the story of the Warrior third-hand – there is no better source, no source closer to the original events.  His version of the story certainly has more credibility than the villagers’ stories, in which the Warrior breathed fire and could collapse houses with a single kick.  Perhaps we’ll never know who the woman was.  But Adam’s story feels closer to reality than anything else I could find, and it’s a story that needs to be told.  Without it, I fear that the Harbinger of War’s story would lack necessary context.  So I included it, even without a first-hand source.
            After all, if all my travels taught me anything, it’s that the Harbingers left no survivors in their wake.  That makes collecting information on them difficult.
            -- Gallivandalid 

Gallivandalid Journal #5: Moving Forward:
            Many have asked what I plan to do once I have completed this work.  Once it is finished, I will leave a note at the end of the prologue explaining my next step.  Adam gave me one final lead, one final thread to follow, at the end of his last interview.  I intend to follow it, though I know it may not pan out.  Indeed, it will lead me on a long, lonely journey, and I may not return at all.  But if there is any chance that following the path he has pointed me towards will teach me the truth of the Harbingers, the truth of this long history I have written, then I must go.  I will release my last set of source material – the remainder of Adam Taylor’s collection – when I submit Cycles of the Sun to the provisional government, and then I will leave on this journey.
            I understand that this means I will not be around when the provisional government reads my work, nor will be I around to defend my work against the detractors that have already begun to spring up.  That is part of the reason for these journals, and all of the other works in this Archive.  Perhaps after I leave these collected works will be enough to defend my main work against its detractors and critics.  Even if these are not enough to defend my work, then perhaps they will be sufficient for excusing its inadequacy.  Either way, it matters little to me.  Should I come back from this final journey, this last bit of research, it is possible that Cycles of the Sun will need to be revised, or even re-written entirely to match what I learn.  Should I fail to come back from this journey, it doesn’t matter for me at all whether my work is well-received or not, since I will never know one way or the other.
            I leave this last journal as a pre-emptive goodbye.  Though I have not yet finished Cycles of the Sun, and so cannot leave yet, I write this journal entry in anticipation of that day.  This journal will remain in the Archive starting now, and will serve as the close of these journal entries.  I hope that they were informative, and led to some greater understand of Cycles of the Sun and the related works stored here in the Archive.  From here on, I will attempt to add only source materials or other relevant works of mine to the Archive; I do not anticipate any more letters of this personal of a nature, unless or until I come back from my final journey.
            Until then,
            -- Gallivandalid